Incompatibility between new and existing products is a major problem in many technical disciplines including networking and signal switching. Often new products are developed having increased performance and speed but customers have invested heavily in legacy products.
Incompatibility is a particular problem with routing-platforms. Generally a router includes a chassis which can be rack mounted and has slots which ports and modules slide into, and which contains basic components such as power supply(s) and fan(s). The modules inserted into the slots are line cards which are the actual printed circuit boards that handle packet data and analog signaling ingress and egress. Line cards provide one or more interfaces over which traffic flows. Thus, depending on the number of slots and interfaces, a router can be configured to work with a variety of networking protocols.
A major concern of customers is to maximize the performance of a given chassis or line card to reduce the needed amount of costly rack space.
One example of a rapidly changing router product is the WIC (WAN Interface Card) where a WAN (Wide Area Network) is a data communications network that serves users across a broad geographic area and often uses transmission devices provided by common carriers. A WIC connects the routing-platform to the WAN link service provider.
Many customers are using WICs designed several years ago which originally targeted PHY devices with a maximum bit rate of up to a few Mbps. Since then, the explosion of the internet and broadband availability has enormously increased the speed and complexity required of routing-platform interfaces. The increased performance required for newly designed WICs requires form factors, pin-outs, and connectors that are different from the legacy cards.
Thus, there is continuing demand to design new cards with higher performance, which often results in different form factors and signal pin-outs, which conflicts with the customers desire to utilize cards and card interfaces already in service.
According to one embodiment of the invention, connectors for a WAN Interface Card Interface (WIC) provide for the development of WAN Interface Cards that can be used across different platforms. The ability to leverage one design in many platforms greatly reduces the development overhead by leveraging one design in many platforms and the number of Modules for homologation, compliance, and safety testing.
According to another embodiment of the invention, a connector assembly includes a card-receiving connector that has first and second parts. The first part is a connector that is compatible with a legacy card-side connector and the second part has contacts for supplying additional power and supply to an improved card. The first and second parts of the card-receiving connector are configured so that a legacy card can be plugged in to the first part without interference from the second part so that the card-receiving connector is compatible with both legacy and improved cards.
According to another embodiment of the invention, the second part of card-receiving connector is disposed over the first part so that the card-side connector is the same width as a legacy connector to facilitate side by side positioning of cards to effectively reduce the amount of costly rack space.
According to another aspect of the invention, a card-side connector includes a first part being a legacy connector and a second part in the form of a card-edge connector for connecting to the second part of the card-receiving connector and providing additional supply and return to an improved card. The use of a card edge connector removes one set of tolerances.
Other features and advantages of the invention will be apparent in view of the following detailed description and appended drawings.